Basically a repost pf things I said in the mega, but anecdotally I'm hearing that sales of fiction read by men are dropping precipitously, and English and literature classes in colleges are now dominated by women. It seems like young men are not being exposed to literature in the same way that they used to. Like, when I was in high school and college, you could be a "bro" kind of guy and read Chuck Palahniuk, or Hunter S. Thompson, or David Foster Wallace. For decades, authors like Hemmingway and Bukowski found receptive audiences in young men, not to mention all the crime fiction, horror, sci-fi, and fantasy that men have traditionally consumed. The "guy in your English class who loves David Foster Wallace" was a stereotype for a reason. I read in another thread that music is less culturally important to young men than it used to be. It seems like younger men just straight up see no value in reading literature or fiction, or exposing themselves or critically engaging with art and music, because the algorithms just railroad them into Alpha Gridset world.
Am I wrong about this? Am I being condescending and out of touch, or is this a real thing that's happening, where the whole "male" culture is turning into grindset podcasts and streamers?
Edit: Okay, so the impression I'm getting is that everything is worse but also kind of the same as it ever was, which sounds right.
Absolutely.
This is what you get after decades of capitalist brainwashing, schools being defunded, worse and working to maximize profits instead of raising our future generations. Competition within the working class reaching an all time high and making people cannibalistic wage slaves that somehow still think they're gonna be the next Elon. Consumerism making people obsessed about their material possesions and looking richer that the rest. Capitalism has made art and culture an expensive commodity to be bought and sold instead of given to the people to enlighten them and make them think for themselves. No one reads anymore, their attention spans are hardwired for 10 second reels that mostly play CIA propaganda by default if it's politics related, e.g. the obsession with the Tiananmen "massacre" and a ton of memes about it giving the impression that it was historically brutal and definitely not something that the West has done in much worse ways. There are ton of examples about how "innocent funny memes" passively propagandise anyone that won't really sit and read about what happened. Cynicism and nihilism are extremely common, probably due to the realization deep down that we are not even remotely living in democracies and the world is steadily getting worse and there's not much you can do about it individually.
I'll say it again, how the fuck are we as communists supposed to radicalize the working class, when the working class refuses to think about anything on a deeper level that is outside of the given framework by the ruling class? How do you get someone to really understand something like Marxism, when they refuse to read anything longer than a maximum length Tweet?
It really bothers me to see how each generation is seemingly getting less and less able to conceptualize and analyze the system they're living under or pretty much anything for that matter, unless it's a science and they're getting paid to do so.
I've lost faith that there is a way. I'm slowly coming around to the concept that the only way to save
the nation(fuck the nation) my people is to burn the nation to the ground, and start from line zero.